Category Archives: Other People’s Research

It’s nearly criminal that the US knows so little about Mexico. Since living there 20+ years ago I’ve thought about it a lot, including about how weird it is that Native Americans from, say, California are called Native Americans and sometimes even identified with the name of their tribe or nation, but those from Coahuila or Baja California Norte are just “Mexican” (which is true, of course) with no recognition that they’re just as Native American as Pueblos, Arapahos, Navajos, Seminoles, etc.

This piece contends that Mexico is home to 65 distinct indigenous groups–though I’ve seen analyses that break those down further to get numbers in the hundreds. The amount of genetic difference between some indigenous Mexican populations and others is as great as the difference between Europeans and East Asians.

As usual, Five Thirty-Eight is awesome. This recent post about American socioeconomic mobility–the likelihood of an individual having a higher SES than her or his parents–is a great read for the demographically- or data-minded. Of particular interest are the male/female patterns in light of starting out wealthy vs. poor. Men and women have clearly different trajectories and opportunities. Fascinating stuff.

As has been noted frequently by others, correlation absolutely does (usually) imply causation (just not necessarily the simplistic X → Y model that immediately forms in our head after reading “X is correlated with Y”). The problem has always been that correlation itself is never enough to know where this causation came from. There are too many possibilities, such as:

Apparently, however, in relatively simple two-variable systems, causality can be identified accuratelyabout 80% of the time, from purely observational data. A recent paper, from a team of German, Swiss, and Dutch researchers, reports the findings. Using a variety of known and simulated cause-effect situations, and utilizing only the observational aspects of the data (not using any experimentally-manipulated situations, for example), the researchers report a very high success rate at figuring out whether X caused Y or vice-versa, by analyzing asymmetries in the “noise” (or error variance) associated with X and Y. The process is called the “additive noise method.” Because, as it turns out, noise in the causal variable can influence the noise in the effect, but not the other way around.

I suppose it’s still possible that this is bad science or bad reporting or something, but to my not-very-astute eye it looks legit. If so, I’m sure it will be developed quickly for other applications. If it is even moderately effective with the very noisy variables many of us in the behavioral sciences deal with, I think it will get itself integrated into SEM methodology and its many descendants and cousins. This would be a huge step forward, as SEM models are currently criticizable for almost certainly mis-specifying cause and effect a lot. This would reduce that a lot. And would probably reduce the number of SEM analyses appearing in behavioral sciences journals, once it became extremely difficult for one’s model to fit both the covariance structure of the data and the patterns of error variance suggesting which variables were later in the causal chain and which earlier.

Great historical psychological research on “shell shock” among British and German soldiers in WWI. Stefanie Linden, a UK psychiatric researcher, is doing some much-delayed work on the actual symptom presentation of Shell-Shocked soldiers from WWI, instead of what I suppose we’ve all been doing for a century–assuming we knew what was up.